With the PR industry globally expanding at a rate of 30% over the past 5 years, we look at the leading PR agencies in Dublin to show how the Irish capital has made its mark as a world-class centre of excellence in public relations.

For a country of its size, Ireland has punched way above its weight on the world stage of arts, entertainment and business. It’s for this reason that Dublin (as well as being the capital of a country noted for its population’s wit, diplomacy & neutrality) and PR agencies Dublin are the powerful engine of a national industry that’s worth multiples of millions of euro.

Globally, the PR sector has expanded at a rate of 30% over the past five years…

The PR industry worldwide has expanded at a rate of 30% over the past five years, and the world’s largest corporations are investing huge sums—ranging from $250,000 up to $25m—every year on public relations.

John Saunders of FleishmanHillard has spoken of the “enormous gift” of being Irish in a global environment such as public relations and communications. He partially attributes the success of the Irish public relations and communications sector in general, and PR agencies Dublin in particular, to “our sense of neutrality, our sense of taking the work seriously, but not ourselves too seriously.”

Saunders’s comment resonates when one surveys the vast, diverse mix of homegrown firms, and affiliates, branches and offshots of the world’s most stellar communications businesses that make up the PR agencies Dublin sector alone.

PR and media relations are not a contemporary phenomenon in Ireland, but have historic roots. One of the most successful PR agencies Dublin has to offer is Wilson Hartnell. Today a global operation, the business was one of Ireland’s first advertising agencies, Wilson Hartnell & Company, and was set up in 1879 by a far-thinking businessman named Henry Crawford Hartnell.

Just as Hartnell was ahead of his time, the most successful PR agencies Dublin and Ireland have been at the forefront of the evolutions in communications and PR over the past two decades. Below, in alphabetical order, AGENT lists 25 of the most successful PR companies based in Dublin.